I can't catch a break. Every time I come close to keeping up with the trends, things change on me. I buy a new laptop, and everyone gets a Mac. I pour myself into stilettos, and flats suddenly come into style. I purchase my first DVD and then must turn around and plead: "What the hell is Blu-Ray?"

Now, just as I've finally started to get my bearings in this dating game (it only took me a decade and a half), it seems that dating is out. Hooking up is the new black. When did this happen? It's just not fair.

As Charles Blow recently pointed out in his op-ed column in the New York Times, courting trends have shifted somewhat. The young people of today (and I'm talking really young, like high school- and college-aged kids, not fake, clinging-to-the-whispers-of-youth-young like me) do not engage in the romantic practices of their predecessors. Gone are the days of a nervous young woman waiting to be pursued by a fellow, perhaps agreeing to accompany him to a spring formal, and then maybe, just maybe, allowing herself to be adorned with his varsity jacket, which she would naturally wear proudly on the sidelines at the big game. Perhaps after many, many months of dating, they might even move things to a more physical level. (Let the record show nothing like this ever happened to me in high school.)

Or maybe, if that's a little too Pleasantville for you, there was this scenario: Boy meets girl. Girl and boy share mutual attraction. Boy asks girl on a date. Girl agrees. They date for a while, break-up, get back together, break-up, get back together, engage in some sort of sexual activity, and then break-up again, this time for real. Is that more familiar? (Grandma and Grandpa? Still not talking about myself here.)

Instead, it seems young people today have a different pattern in place. They hang out in large groups, no real partnerships or alliances forged, until a hook up happens. (A hook up, my fellow dinosaurs, occurs when two friendly acquaintances decide to have a casual sexual experience together, but without any expectation of a relationship to follow. As Blow so eloquently states: "Think of it as a one-night stand with someone you know.")

And lest you think I'm using this to open yet another forum for teenager-bashing, understand this: young adults are not engaging in any more sexual activity than previous generations, according to both Blow and the Centers for Disease Control. They're actually not as active as kids were back in my day. Hooking up is not synonymous with promiscuity. According to a 2006 study from the Guttmacher Institute, teenagers are waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past, and over 80% of them are using contraception (this is better than the adult rate of contraception use, by the way). They aren't having more sex, or unsafe sex. They're simply switching up the order of operations on us and adding some lingo to the relationship vernacular. They're sly, those young people.

I was pretty entertained throughout most of Blow's column until the very end, when I found these lines:

It used to be that "you were trained your whole life to date," said [Kathleen] Bogle [a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia]. "Now we've lost that ability – the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them."

Now that's sad.

So, basically, kids now are hanging out, getting to know each other in a platonic situation, maybe hooking up to see if they want to take things to the next level – and we're upset about this? That's bad? Because I'm kind of thinking that sounds almost exactly like the kind of dating I've always done, except I play more games and tend to spill a lot in public. (Also, who was trained her whole life to date? We're not at a dog show. That sounds like either some sort of soulless procreation robot or a tres tragique Victorian heroine who's just about to load her pockets with rocks and wander into the river, if you ask me.) If the teen pregnancy rate is at an all-time low, people are waiting longer to have their first sexual experience and they're not being idiots about condoms and birth control, how is this new model not an improvement?

Obviously, the ideal situation would be that young adults wouldn't engage in any sexual activity until they're completely ready for it, but the same can be wished for a lot of older adults too. And who's to say that spending time with a person on a platonic level and then maybe having a more intimate trial relationship isn't a good idea? And to be honest, it still doesn't resonate any differently to me than previous ideas of dating. The only difference is the absence of the stiff formality of first, second, third and subsequent dates. Those nascent few awkward hours spent together, forcing conversation and discussing goals as though you're in the world's longest, most dimly lit job interview are enough to make me say: Kudos, young people, for managing to spare yourselves of that.

Fellow dinosaurs, it might be time to admit that the young people have one-upped us here. Between this and their darned, new-fangled video games, they're having a way better time.

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